Dangerous Day Job

I’ve noticed in the book I’m reading right now, ‘Beartown,’ the author Fredrik Backman likes to use an interesting technique I haven’t seen much before. I know I’ve seen it used previously, but I just can’t think of any other authors who use it quite as much. I’m not sure if it has a name. I’ve just been calling it a lookahead whenever I see him use it because I think that describes it pretty well.

To bring extra attention to the importance of a certain moment or detail, he’ll let the narrator wander into the future. He exposes the reader to a glimpse of how the current event happening on page right now will impact the character months, years, or even decades later. How they’ll look back and remember curious details about what happened. How something terrible will leave a scar that never goes away and haunts them just as they start to forget, or how something beautiful will remind them that life is worth living when they’re at their lowest later on. This technique does so much heavy lifting for him. At face value it gives the reader a lot more insight into how deeply a character is affected by something, but it’s also a clever technique to work extra details into the current scene without having to blandly state what’s going on in a more direct way. He’s able to inject the tiniest, otherwise irrelevant details that the human brain so often recalls most clearly straight into your mind’s eye without it feeling like a distraction at all. Few authors (myself included) are able to pull this off so seamlessly. Furthermore, whenever he does this, a general sense of destiny at play pervades the story. Like the characters are on a certain course in their lives and everything that happens to them is deeply impactful, for better or for worse. He’s able to convey so much about what’s going on currently, what’s going on within the character, and more general thematic elements too in just a few lines. It’s an ingenious pattern he uses a lot.

I love this technique so much I think I’ll just have to steal it for my own purposes. Unfortunately I don’t usually write like he does with such a floaty narrator, so if I do want to put it into play I’ll have to make some other adjustments too. Worth it though!

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley